Web Office is all about the HTML
Clearly, I didn’t get it. I had no idea how important it was to post content as HTML. Nor did I have any idea how important it was to include lots of useful hyperlinks.
Amazingly, ironically, and somewhat embarrassingly, I learnt this lesson as I published an essay entitled “The Next Wave in Productivity Tools: Web Office“.
The article makes the pitch for using web based tools like blogs and wikis within the enterprise. But, 5 weeks ago, in a stroke of utter genius, I wrote only a small blog post describing the paper and included a link to a pdf of the article. About 10 days later, thanks to some prodding from one of my fellow Pragmatic Studio Alumni, I got around to posting the essay in HTML. Here’s the difference that HTML made:
I have learnt some important lessons from this. Most important is that any Web Office solution needs to publish content and data as HTML. Recently, I have been looking at a whole series of products built by really clever teams who are all trying to follow in Writely’s foot steps.
eyeOS, Zoho, JotSpot, NumSum, iRows and many more are building AJAX copies of existing MS Office and Open Office applications. My honest suggestion to the folks on those teams is STOP. If you are part of a team building an AJAX powered alternative to Word or Excel, you should instead apply your amazing talent to building a social application that can take advantage of all the power that simple, plain old xHTML brings to the table.
JotSpot might be the exception here, with their MashUp features. JotSpot has a tool that makes a Google map from addresses listed in a spreadsheet. Now, that is interesting and new.
However, the truth is that companies are not desperate to replace Excel and Word. Instead, they are desperate to find new ways of sharing information and leveraging their existing team.
The enterprise already has basic desk top applications and shared drives. The enterprise lacks an integrated Web Office solution that adds to the list of existing applications. Very few big companies have everyone blogging internally. Very few big companies have figured out how to use internal Wikis.
No big company that I know of is currently using internal blogs, wikis, social bookmarks, social networks, RSS calendars, pod casting and tagging to empower their knowledge workers. There are a few technology companies that have internal blogs and Wikis, but they have been set up in haphazard fashion, with no unified structure for cleanly integrating things like LDAP or information from back-end systems.
Think about how a big bank, a retail giant and a global manufacturing firm. Think about how they could use Web 2.0 technology to improve internal communication by giving knowledge workers web based publishing tools like blogs and wikis. Then think about how these companies will need to customize those tools. That’s the real Web Office opportunity.
Rod, your link to your essay isn’t working.
“The Next Wave in Productivity Tools: Web Office”
Thank you Isaac. The link is now fixed.
Rod, you mention “The enterprise already has basic desk top applications and shared drives” but in my experience in both education and industry, shared drives are the second worst place to keep your desktop application data (second only to the desktop.)
Specifically, shared drives lack organization and tagging, the permission structure is too rigid, and most applications do not handle multiple simultaneous authors at all.
In contrast, my office has adopted Writely for several purposes; the best example is probably meeting agendas. By moving these online the manager doesn’t have to prepare an agenda or send out the weekly “send me your agenda items for the week” message, instead if something comes up between meetings you can add it to the agenda immediately to assure you don’t forget about it.
In our organization we have found Writely and iRows fit in a gap between desktop app and Wiki… collaborative, but not quite public (or even institution-wide.)
Jon,
That’s a great comment. Thank you.
You hit upon an important issue that we are struggling with as we build out an enterprise blogging system at my firm. The issue is what kind of tool does a company need to be able to work on all points along the collaboration continuum.
You want some stuff to be public outside the firewall, some for the whole company, and some for a very small group. I think this issue is separate from whether or not Writely and NumSum are the right tools.
Maybe Writely is the easiest way to set up and share your agendas. Another way to get there would be to use something like BasecampHQ, or BackpackIT.
The upside to Basecamp pr Backpack is that they have some cool customized tools. The downside is that their vision of what you need might not be the right one. If their vision is not the right one, I can see why it would make sense to build a customized tool for your group within something like NumSum, or iRows.
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